While Fu always had to balance her job with taking care of the children, her friends and colleagues say the battle for Yang has brought out a new, bolder side in her.

“She has had to go from being someone who is quiet and somewhat shy, to having to be so persistent in order to be in the face of all these congressmen and not be disappointed by the amount of persistence it takes,” Seavy says. “She’s so strong and it’s amazing the hours she’s putting into this in addition to being a full-time working woman.”

Even before Yang left for China, Fu was the core of the family, caring for the children and financially supporting the family when Yang was studying at KSG.

“She was always the breadwinner in the household because as a student, he was always into his causes,” says Nancy Smith, Fu’s colleague at HMS. “So she was the breadwinner before and she is it now.”

And Fu avoided interfering in her husband’s work life, preferring to remain his most ardent supporter—even when he told her about his risky plan to return to China.

Fu hid her husband’s arrest from their family for 10 days—and ended up defending Yang’s trip to her sister-in-law when she asked how Fu could have let Yang go.

“As a wife, I could only make it easy for him,” Fu says. “I don’t fight him—he’s a man, he knows what he must do and I support him. I know how important his family is for him but he also has something higher than this.”

Now, Fu has become as politically active as Yang once was—on top of mothering two children with no father.

Fu says her son Aaron constantly asks about Yang.

“He always says, ‘He told me he was coming home, why isn’t he here? Does Dad have enemies? Is an enemy keeping him?’” Fu says. “One night he cried that he really misses daddy and said he didn’t think he could wait any longer.”

The day after this conversation, Aaron’s school called Fu to say he was sick. When she got to the school to pick him up, she found Aaron completely healthy. He had pretended to be ill so that Fu, not one of her friends who had been picking him up lately, would come get him.

A Superwoman?

Even though Fu has tried to appear outwardly strong, Yang’s disappearance has shaken her.

She became depressed after Yang’s arrest and was given a two month disability leave from Harvard.

She says she has trouble concentrating at work and relies on the flexibility HMS has given her to travel to Washington frequently.